This week, many folks on the left proved themselves to be functionally illiterate, room-wise.
When a terrorist operation indiscriminately slaughters innocent men, women and children and streams their atrocities on social media, this is usually seen as a moral horror. The people who commit these acts are normally considered bad guys — even if they have very legitimate grievances against the nation where their victims live, as I agree Palestinians do against the state of Israel.
No matter how just one’s cause, some tactics can never be legitimate.
If you’ve been on social media the past few days, you know how many folks in academia just couldn’t bring themselves to say this after Hamas went on a rampage against Israeli civilians. College administrators, usually good for a bracing dose of moral condemnation, issued curiously muted responses. Worse, some student groups suggested that the real blame for the rape of Israeli women and the murder of Israeli babies belonged to … the Israelis. An American Studies professor at Yale tweeted, “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” The president of NYU Law’s Student Bar Association opened the group’s weekly newsletter with a cheery “Hi, y’all” before going on to declare that “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.”
This triggered a backlash that was entirely predictable — except, I guess, to the authors of those missives. Furious alumni complained; hedge fund mogul Bill Ackman suggested that Harvard, his alma mater, should name the members of student groups that had signed onto a particularly noxious letter so that CEOs could avoid hiring them.Various folks obliged by doxxing group members. A law firm rescinded the NYU student’s job offer.
This was followed by some frantic backpedaling, as administrators belatedly remembered to mention that Hamas had committed terrible atrocities. Some of the students and groups — including the NYU SBA — repudiated the sentiments that had been endorsed under their names.
Like most of you, I’m appalled by the idea that maybe terrorism is okay, if you target the right civilians. I’m mad at these people for saying awful, stupid things. I’m also mad that I now have to defend the worst of them from cancellation. Because make no mistake: What is being done, or at least attempted, is cancel culture, though I got a lot of pushback from conservatives when I said so on X, formally known as Twitter.
These people were talking about war crimes, I was reminded. And, given their politics, they were likely to be themselves avid supporters of cancellation. You can’t expect us, conservatives said indignantly, to unilaterally disarm in the culture wars.
I take both points. But free speech is the cornerstone of our democracy, and free speech by definition requires protecting unpopular ideas. Since bad ideas are often unpopular, this will include protecting some bad ones — fighting them with good ideas, rather than threats.
Of course I understand why companies might be reluctant to hire students who think it’s okay to murder babies. But we must resist falling into the false binaries that distort the thinking of both the terrorists and the cancelers. The world is not neatly divided into good people who deserve protection and irredeemably bad people who deserve anything they get; it is full of complicated, flawed human beings who can often be better, with a little bit of grace. Many, maybe most, Irish Americans of a certain age have known otherwise decent people who nonetheless supported terrorism, emotionally or financially. We also witnessed many of those same folks repent after 9/11 drove home what terrorism actually means to its victims.
As this example suggests, the way to change minds is not through punishment. As your grandmother may have told you, “One convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” It’s better to know what people believe so that you can argue them out of it, rather than to shame or harass them into silence.
Now, I do understand the strategic logic of what you might call “counter-cancellation”: trying to restore some balance between left and right by making it clear that two can play the cancellation game. But in this case, conservatives might be overestimating how unbalanced academia actually is. I asked my followers on X to send me their university communications about both the Hamas attack and earlier horrors such as the invasion of Ukraine. In some cases, the double standard was just as glaring as you might suspect.. But in many other cases, presidents and deans were fast and forthright in condemning terrorism and laying blame where it belonged.
What’s more, as I’ve written in other contexts, while tit-for-tat has its uses, it also risks spiraling into a blood feud. And even if one is willing to take this risk, it’s unnecessary at this point. Yes, a lot of lefties demanded exquisite deference to their own feelings while assuming they retained the right to offend others as they pleased. But I suspect that by now they understand what they obviously did not before: that the room is a lot larger than their lecture halls, and they are not the only ones in it. They aren’t even the majority. So if they keep insisting that social media mobs be allowed to dole out vigilante justice, they are at least as likely to be its targets as its executioners.
Now is the time to show them a better way, modeling what tolerance and inclusion actually look like. Point out their errors, frequently and forcefully. Then leave it at that.
Credit: Source link
